Turn unspoken expectations into shared agreements.
Team Interaction Principles helps teams define the behaviors they expect from one another so they can communicate, collaborate, and work through friction more effectively.
Bill writes about Team Interaction Principles (TIPs) in chapter 16.
Get the book →Every team develops expectations about how people should communicate, make decisions, respond to one another, handle disagreement, and follow through. When those expectations stay unspoken, people fill in the gaps with their own assumptions.
Team Interaction Principles gives the team a way to make those expectations visible. Together, team members identify the behaviors that help them do their best work, the behaviors that create friction, and the communication approaches that help them contribute effectively.
From that conversation, the team creates five to seven specific principles that describe how they agree to work together. The principles need to be behavioral enough that people can recognize when they’re being lived and when they’re slipping.
The principles then become part of how the team operates. A recurring TIPs check-in uses four lenses: Transparency, Intent Alignment, Personal Accountability, and Support. These give the team a structured way to surface changing conditions, talk about friction, and choose an adjustment before problems have time to harden.
The goal is to create a team where people understand what good interaction looks like and have a shared language for addressing it when the team gets off track.
Give each person time to think about the conditions that help them contribute at their best.
Ask:
What behavior from teammates helps you perform at your best?
What behavior makes it harder for you to contribute?
What communication style helps you process information and make decisions?
Let people answer independently before discussing the responses as a group.
The differences give you useful information about where expectations may collide.
Look across the responses for recurring themes.
Pay attention to differences around things like speed and thoroughness, direct and contextual communication, autonomy and collaboration, recognition, feedback, and decision-making.
Describe the pattern at the team level. For example: “We have different expectations about how directly feedback should be delivered.”
Keep the conversation focused on working patterns so the team can address them together.
Turn the patterns into five to seven clear behavioral commitments.
Examples might include:
We challenge ideas while respecting the person.
We clarify intent before reacting.
We close the loop on commitments by the end of the week.
We create room for different voices before making a decision.
Write the principles in first-person plural so they belong to the team.
Each principle should be specific enough that the team can recognize what it looks like in practice.
Keep the TIPs somewhere visible and reference them when they’re relevant to meetings, feedback, decisions, and project work.
Use them as shared language when friction surfaces.
Ask: Which of our TIPs applies here? What would following it look like right now?
The principles become useful through repeated use in real situations.
Quarterly, or when friction begins building, hold a 30-minute TIPs check-in around four areas:
Transparency: What information are we holding back? What needs to be said?
Intent Alignment: Where could unclear direction lead us to make different priority calls?
Personal Accountability: Where are we under-owning outcomes or depending too heavily on individual heroics?
Support: Who may be overloaded? Where could we reduce friction?
Give people a minute or two to reflect before opening the discussion. Close by choosing one specific adjustment, assigning ownership, and setting a check-in date.
One visible change gives the team something concrete to practice before the next check-in.
The core technique stays the same — but how you apply it shifts depending on your role, your team, and your environment.
Set the purpose before you ask the team to co-create the principles. Explain that the conversation is about agreeing on how the team wants to work together so expectations are visible before friction has to expose them.
Let people know this is a setup conversation focused on what helps everyone do their best work. Give each person room to contribute, and keep the discussion centered on team behaviors and shared expectations.
<em>The facilitator’s job is to create the conditions for an honest conversation and help the team turn what they hear into clear, shared principles.</em>
Create your TIPs early, before people have spent months interpreting one another through assumptions. The conversation gives everyone a voice in defining how the team will work and surfaces differences in working styles while they’re still easy to discuss.
<em>Early clarity gives the team a shared starting point for how they want to work together.</em>
Use the TIPs check-in after a demanding project, personnel change, or stretch of high pressure. Start with <strong>Transparency</strong> and <strong>Support</strong> to understand what people experienced and what they need going forward.
Listen for patterns across the team and choose one adjustment that would meaningfully improve how people work together.
<em>A difficult stretch can reveal expectations and friction that were harder to see under normal conditions.</em>
Watch your footing
The one-page Team Interaction Principles (TIPs) PDF reference, plus weekly tools and techniques to help you lead through uncertainty — from Bill's Lead for Tomorrow newsletter.
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